There’s also a great write-up recently in the WSJ, which is an interesting read.

As metagg mentions, there are a lot of interesting ways to use twitter, especially when it comes to connecting to “your audience”.

In the SMS arena, Twitter faces competition from textmarks and facebook. The former allows you to easily setup groups for general discussion, private messages, and a dynamic group status update — and an option for the owner to monetize on a per-message or monthly-fee basis. The latter has status updates, follow, and direct messaging built in to their service, but are limited by lack of international availability and that it is a “closed network”. However, twitter allows you to close off your updates to friends only.

Regardless, I am intrigued to see the progression of “microblogging” over the course of the year.

An interesting thing about Twitter is its ability to do stuff for other services, Lifehacker had an interesting write-up the other day about SMS’ing your life.

They talk about the Twitter Google Calender bot and the Remember the Milk bot. I think it is free for any company to implement a bot right now, but I could see Twitter charging for the service later on. They would become the service provider of the SMS part of your application. You benefit because of the ease you can add SMS to your website/service, they benefit because you are paying them.

Interestingly enough, the twitter bots remind of some IM buddy of the late 90s early 2000s that did basically the same thing. You could add him as a friend and then you could ask him for the weather or about movie time. I can’t remember the name though.

Anyway, I am not so sure money was being wasted here because that is just one potential revenue stream and a pretty dang useful feature…-Metagg

I would be very surprised to see so many different VC firms and angel investors going in for a combined 20% of the capitalization. I’m sure they have preferred and liquidity preference, but even then I really doubt they would be willing to accept that little control. If it was one firm taking that much (e.g. Sequoia taking 20% of Mahalo), I could buy it.

It’s fun to see so much money being wasted. It looks like these investors really are acting like a charity: http://livinginfirstlife.wordp.....a-charity/

@Aidian: I’m not so sure twitter’s service comes cheap. I don’t pay a thing for the txt messaging support, twitter picks up that bill. Sure, they’ve got a bulk rate, but still, I’m curious what their monthly bill is…. (perhaps Michael could poke around and find out this figure as well

Good point. ICQ is like an old pile of rubbish it still exists?

Cheers,
Aidan
http://www.MappingTheWeb.com

Thank you!

Pre-money valuation is what the company is worth before it gets the venture money. 20 + 5 = 25. 5 / 25 = 1 / 5 = 0.2 = 20%.

Guess accounting isn’t your thing . . .

@ Mike Arrington

“We heard that it was a small round, between $1 - $5 million, but frankly I suspected it would be on the low end of that range.”

!=

“As best as we can tell, the company raised a $5 million round, on a $20 million pre-money valuation.”

As VC Paul Kedrosky noted, Twitter’s attraction lies in the many vague possibilities it has for earning money. Surely the team knows some specific ways they could start to pull in revenue, but if they just went with one now, they could implement it wrong and waste huge opportunities down the road.

Twitter is not run by a bunch of first-timers. Several of the creators made Blogger, which was a great service for its time. I trust they won’t waste their money or their popularity.

how many employees do they have?